In an interview with Rock Sound, vocalist Awsten Knight said that Telephone was almost cut during the transition between Friendly Reminder and Fandom. Before it was adapted for Fandom, Telephone was “closest to a pop-punk sound”, which they didn’t like.

‘'Telephone’‘ I almost cut originally, because it was the closest thing to a pop-punk sounding thing, and I was just like fuck this, scratch all those distorted guitars, fuck those drums, it hits too hard.

The band edited and re-imagined the song until they thought it met the new standards they had for their third album.

Knight further elaborated on the song in a track-by-track of Fandom for Rock Sound:

‘Telephone’ was written when I was super fucking depressed – surprise – and I was at Target. I saw a cute girl at Target, and instead of being like, ‘Sup’ – I would have never done that anyway – I went home and wrote a super obsessive love song, and it was so tight.

Geoff Wigington: He called me and was like, ‘Dude, I’ve just seen the prettiest person at Target, I don’t even know what to do – I can’t find them now. I think I’m just gonna go home and write about it’.

Awsten: Did that happen?

Geoff: Yeah!

Awsten: Alright. Either way, I also don’t remember what they look like anymore. Because I saw the responses when I said that were like, ‘What does she look like, blah blah blah missed connection’, and I honestly don’t remember. It was like, January 2018. Yeah, so that song’s that.

There’s another reason that it almost wasn’t on the album – the original version was kind of pop-punk sounding, and I was like, ‘Fuck that’. But the other reason is, I was trying to decide if it takes away from the album – but it doesn’t though. Because with some of the other themes of the album, it counts as the sugar-spike in [‘Fandom’]. Because when you’re dealing with some shit, you have hard ups and downs, and it’s kind of like a manic thing. It’s lodged between ‘High Definition’ which is a very lonely, isolating song, then you’ve got the ‘AAAAAAH!’ (we pretend that ‘Group Chat’ isn’t a thing for a second), and we have ‘Turbulent’. So it’s between those guys. That’s how it’s meant to be. It’s like, low – very high – very low.

Yes! Waterparks' videographer Jawn Rocha filmed the band playing “Telephone” for its live debut during their Anti-Tour livestream concert.